What is vtemplate?

The Git repository says it well enough: vtemplate is a boilerplate setup for starting new [web] projects which combines various industry standards. There are a few tweaks here and there, but otherwise it’s loyal to upstream. You’ll recognise many favourite technologies used in vtemplate, ranging from Stylus to Kohana to Behat. But before I run through these technologies, I’d like to highlight the ideals behind vtemplate:

HTML5Boilerplate

You really can’t go wrong with HTML5Boilerplate. It’s a great piece of collaboration by very experienced frontend web coders and very well documented. This is a great first step to writing responsive, cross-browser, HTML5-valid code. This also brings in so many other frontend joys like HumansTXT, Modernizer, JQuery and so on.

Stylus

If If you’re using another CSS preprocessor, this’ll show you just how clean your CSS can really be. If you’re not yet using a preprocessor … well, you’ll soon find out why it’s so awesome. Admittedly Stylus isn’t as popular as the big boys like LESS, but it has a very lenient syntax and is easy to swap out.

Mustache

WYMEditor CMS

Why are your clients modifying their site with bloated CMSes and complex, unsemantic rich text WYSIWYGs? Keep things simple, and let your code govern the CMS, not the other way around. WYMEditor reads and writes directly to clean segments of frontend files and understands your CSS. Best of all, it makes it easy to review changes with version control. Read more about the simple CMS approach here.

PHPSpec2

Behat and Mink

Another great tool from the same guys who brought PHPSpec2. Whereas PHPSpec covers all your unit testing, Behat is excellent for full stack and UI testing, with the beauty of a semantic Gherkin syntax. Mink is just icing on the cake, giving an easy to use abstraction to emulate browsers.

Phing

Test. Configure. Build. Deploy. Do it again!

So if you’re developing a web application with PHP, check out vtemplate :)

What’s new in vtemplate 1.0.0?

Well, apart from being the first release, where by definition everything is new, there have been a few more tweaks since my last post on it.

Phing building, deploying and quality control with all sorts of goodies